• A notable submission from a South African fan has landed on LEGO Ideas.
• LEGO Ideas allows anyone to have their project turned into an official retail set.
• Submissions like this need votes to be considered by the company.

LEGO Ideas – the platform which allows anyone to create a submission that may eventually become a retail LEGO set – has a new submission that comes right here from South Africa. It takes the form of a themed chess set which comes with its own lore and pits two fantasy forces against each other.

This submission was created by Barry Kay, a member of several local LEGO initiatives and a common fixture at the LEGO exhibitions in the country.

“As with many LEGO fans, it has always been a dream of mine to get a set approved on LEGO Ideas. I did not want to only submit a good looking set – it needed to mean something to me. I was inspired by LEGO’s latest advancements in minifigures which are more detailed and varied than ever, especially with little creatures and non-human body shapes. From this I created my own story of the classic good versus evil conflict, and what better way to set this scene than on a chess board?” Kay tells us.

That conflict, which you can see in the gallery below, is between the good Mushlings of Mushwood Grove and the evil Hordes of the Dark Forest.

For Kay’s project to go from an idea to a retail set, it requires votes on the LEGO Ideas website here.

If the project manages to get 10 000 votes, LEGO will move the project into an internal review process. This review process and its workings are mostly a mystery to the outside world, but it involves many aspects to judge how well any given set will do as something the public will like.

The build experience, the pieces used, internal data, external marketing information and much more goes into this process. For projects that use IPs this also involves legal talks with the IP owner(s) and all the legal entanglement that entails. As Kay’s unique chess board is a wholly original idea, this last part won’t be a factor.

To vote for this submission all it takes is a LEGO account and to vote on the aforementioned Ideas website. Even if you don’t have an account, the sign up process is very quick and it should take a minute at most to leave a vote.

It would be a real watershed moment for a South African LEGO Ideas project to make it all the way and become a retail set. Some South Africans have managed to get 10 000 votes and make it into the review process, only to be turned down at this step. The most recent of these is an A-Team submission that got the required votes but didn’t survive the review process.

As LEGO Ideas has been around since 2011, it seems like a real shame that our country hasn’t been represented just yet.